Vocino Labs

It’s now a week or something into twenty-ten. More than ever, I’ve realized that communicating and interacting with cool, smart, interesting people is what fuels the tanks of creative technology start-up junkies more than anything. You can’t stay home and work constantly. You just have to go hang out.

I was having a beer with my friend and accomplished colleague Steven the other night just talking about tech business and what sort of magic we can create. The subsequent inspiration is invaluable to any internet entrepreneur. You should go out and suck it up any time you have the opportunity.

Not to mention, from these meetings, we have some great projects lined up that will change the world (or something like that). I have also been reinvigorated in my own projects for The Lab. This weekend I have cranked out more deliverables for my new web app than I have in the last 2 months of just talking about it. I’m now getting dangerously close to putting it into serious development and actually having a projected launch date in the very near future.

Response from friends has been pretty good but that is generally nothing compared to real market response. However, sink or swim, at least I will have delivered a fully-functional web application that serves a specific niche in the market for a long-tail demographic that needs some filling. That’s what this whole internet shit is all about, ain’t it?

As the new year starts our priorities shift again into focusing on getting those lingering ideas completed: from picking up some loose ends on a mid-cycle site design to starting the flagship site relaunch that will turbocharge 2010.

Over at The Lab, we’re kick starting our new year by kick starting your new projects. We want to create some awesome work for you and your company and send you into 2010 with style, skill and a possibly OCD-level of attention to detail.

That’s why we’re rocking some fresh winter rate discounts!

Most projects will see a 15% discount off our standard hourly rate, making your weekly development iterations more manageable and squeezing into those new budgets. Larger undertakings can see additional discounts depending on scheduling and availability.  On the hosting side, if you host your new site with us you will receive an entire month absolutely free.  The bottom line?  We want to see your web development goals reached.

These special rates will only last while space is available in the winter schedule (which won’t be long), so please express your interest as soon as possible.

Believe it or not, Microsoft’s new Bing search service is the fastest-growing top-10 search engine in the US, according to a Nielsen report released Monday.

The total amount of searches on Bing rang in at 1.1 billion for the month of August, a leap of 22.1 percent over July, winning Microsoft a 10.7 percent share of the search engine market.

Google remained in the top spot with a commanding 64.6 percent share, accounting for 7 billion searches in August, a gain of 2.6 percent over July. Yahoo saw its search results drop 4.2 percent for the month to 1.7 billion, earning it 16 percent of the market.

We Are Googlers

We use Google Apps to manage the Vocino Labs email, document, calendar and chat infrastructure so we’re pretty married to Google at the moment (not that we couldn’t jump ship if we needed to). However, I’m still very happy that Bing is generating some momentum.  Not because I like Bing or use it at all, but because this represents healthy competition for Google.

We also do a lot of Google-related services such as Adwords and Analytics consulting. Which does contribute to our G-love.

While Google does innovate, of course, it doesn’t necessarily always have to release that new feature or fix that nagging UI annoyance. They often do, don’t get me wrong.  Google is an advertising company at the heart of it though. So while they enjoy innovation and creativity, as long as they have an unbelievably dominating percentage of the market’s eyeballs, they don’t have a fire under them to invest in those new elements.

Google ain’t feelin it quite yet

Bing’s success isn’t coming at the cost of Google’s market share quite yet anyway. Most of the attrition has come from Yahoo and AOL search solutions to a more evolved technology. These weren’t Google users looking for huge splash photos on their search homepage.

This is why you’re not going to see the big G scrambling to implement new candy to get us excited yet.

Have you started using Bing for any searching?

On Friday, D.C. news outlet The Hill reported that Congressman Joe Wilson has hired a “professional tweeter.” What exactly does this kind of title mean? In my mind, this term evokes a comical reference to characters from movies like “Leon: The Professional” or “The Transporter.”

Despite what you may have heard last week on CNN, this Twitter stuff is not about a cute blue birdie that you post updates on ice cream flavors or Hello Kitty shopping sprees. Now this is serious business. You need The Social Media Carpetbagger Professional.

We don’t know what that qualification means at this point, but I would guess that any decent one has a really awesome hidden wall that slides out to reveal an array of the latest Palm Pilots PDAs, micro SD grenades full of tweet-bots, and terabytes of hot-chick profile disguises for MySpace.

In case you didn’t catch the political news on Wilson this week, he’s the S.C. Republican Congressman who interrupted Pres. Obama’s health care speech with the “You lie!” Capitalizing on this spotlightfrom both the MSM and netroots, Wilson has raised a large sum of contributions. Funds total over a million bucks, in fact, and this has caused him to go shopping for the very best in ‘Social Media professionals’.

His 2010 challenger, Rob Miller, a former Marine who served in Iraq, has actually out raised him and surpassed the million-mark earlier. However, it has been a constant smack-talking exchange on the funding gains from the anomaly. Primary outlets for this rabble rousing have been the usual seedy hangouts in the blog underworld at FreeRepublic and DailyKos, respectively.

Wilson’s tweet-pro is David All, whose slogan is “The Nations First Conservative Web 2.0 Agency.” He also has a big client in Florida’s Marco Rubio, who is attempting to run a primary for the U.S. Senate race against Gov. Charlie Crist. Since he is vastly out gunned on funding, Rubio hopes to overcome the favored Gov. Crist with web based tactics on the cheap. He seems to have at least bought some credibility from this, securing a cover story “Yes, He Can”, from the highly-influential conservative magazine National Review. NR describes him, somewhat cynically, as one “who quotes Snoop Dogg lyrics on his Twitter account.”

The Wilson v. Miller fundraising battle will be the one to watch for now, as Wilson’s ‘Professional’ is going up against the more established trends and organizations of left-wing power. In Miller’s corner is the online fundraising structure from ActBlue and web from NGP software.

Since Miller already had this in place, it has certainly helped in gaining a bigger edge in ‘retaliation’ funds from the Wilson outburst. What remains to be seen is how this matchup will play out if Wilson is truly intent on parlaying most of his new money into a nation-wide web following.

Finally, the Wall Street Journal writes today that free information online means that campaign funding and regulation is becoming obsolete, and therefore the SCOTUS should invalidate the McCain-Feingold regulations on contributions. If this does happen, it would be a huge transformation in free speech issues and development of political communication.

With any web development project comes a great responsibly which usually falls on the client: creating content.

We like to have at least a good portion of the content available before starting on the design of the site. Place holders are fine in some cases but if your goal is really to design information, you need the actual content that will ultimately go into your design.

Depending on your CMS, you will have numerous options for styling content themselves via a WYSIWYG editor. This is good and bad. A lot of times what you end up with is way too much freedom provided to the copy writer and too much design going into content. Content is styled with CSS, not within a TinyMCE window.

Ideally, you should only be contributing baseline HTML tags like <strong>, <em>, and any relevant heading tags. This way elements are styled appropriately and when it comes time to change the look and feel of the site down the line, you’re not dealing with tons of embedded styles in the content.

Writing Great Content

Once you’ve given them an understanding of what they are allowed to do (sounds bad, doesn’t it?), you can offer them with some tools to help channel that focus to great content.

Fairly or not, the internet has earned a reputation as the home for typos, incorrect spelling, and bad grammar. Automattic, the company that created WordPress, is taking steps to improve that with the just-announced acquisition of a spell-checking startup called After the Deadline.

This quickly became a must-install for our clients using WordPress. Here’s how it works…

With Automattic now behind keeping the development of the project up to date, it adds a lot of confidence to deploying the plugin on more sites.